ASUS Qube Google TV box hands-on

ASUS‘ first go in the Google TV realm became official today. We heard earlier that the company would be digging its paws in that market a few days ago, but ASUS officially unveiled their Qube Google TV box today at CES 2013. We also happened to get our grubby little hands on the new device here at Pepcom inside CES.

Just as its name suggests, the Qube comes in the shape of a…cube, and it has an IR receiver on the front to work with a remote control, and there’s a USB port on the right side. On the back, there’s an HDMI-in, HDMI-out, another USB port, RJ-45 Ethernet, and IR-out — quite a few options for those who want ultimate connectivity.

Inside the Qube is a Marvell Armada 1500 chipset with 1GB of RAM and 4GB of storage, which isn’t a lot of storage space at all, but it’s safe to assume that a lot of the content you’ll be watching will be streamed through the cloud anyway.

Now here’s the bad news, the Qube that ASUS had at their booth here at Pepcom wasn’t a working model, but rather just a display unit of sorts. As far as availability and pricing, the Qube is expected to launch in the US this March at a steep price of $150, which a bit more than most set-top boxes these days, so we hope ASUS brings all they have with this new box.